The increasing diversity of click stream analysis involves the analysis of user requests when visiting a Web site. Each request by a user represents a request to a server of the Web site that was made by the user ‘clicking’ on a visual object on a Web page on the Web site with a mouse or other input device. The visual object can be an icon, a hyperlink, or another logical representation of the request. These requests are stored in a Web server log for the Web site, where each log record typically corresponds to a single request for a single event. Click stream analysis is intended to aid Web site owners in understanding how visitors are using their Web site.
Current click stream analysis products typically provide aggregate path analysis reports, which show general trends of how users are using particular Web sites. The size of data that is accumulated for at a particular Web site can be enormous because the accumulated data includes each request by each user during each visit. If the Web site is actively used by the public, and multiple servers are used to provide web services to the Web site, the accumulated data can exceed one (1) terabyte in a period of 24 hours. For this reason, current click stream analysis products typically provide aggregate path analysis reports (e.g. path calculation reports) that are limited to a depth of six (6) user clicks or less from where a user enters the Web site. This limitation on click depth in aggregate path analysis reports has an inherent lack in granularity. In many instances, this lack in granularity for high user volume Web site causes a failure of the aggregate path analysis reports to adequately assist the Web site owner or analyst in reconstructing precisely what behavior (e.g. all of the series of ‘clicks’ or server-requests) led users to particular requests (e.g. purchasing an item) when visiting the Web site. For instance, the owner of a high user volume Web site, or an analyst thereof, desires to reconstruct each user request and represent the same in a path calculation report. To do so, the path calculation report will have to show more than six sequential clicks by the users. For this kind of exhaustive click stream analysis, the entire Web server log needs to be scanned, collated and queried, which requires excessive accumulation of data in an inefficient and time consuming process that is rarely justified by its expense.